An Ecological Approach to Observations of Children's Everyday Lives

In spite of a long tradition of scientific study of children and their development, little is known about the fabric of children’s everyday lives – the activities, social partners, and interactions that form part of everyday experiences. This perhaps sounds a strange way to begin the chapter, given the wealth of attention given to children by scholars in the fields of developmental psychology and sociology. However, the vast bulk of psychologists have conducted their research on children in laboratory or laboratory-like situations or have relied on parents’ reports rather than examining children’s typically occurring everyday activities (Tudge, Hogan, & Etz, 1999). Sociologists, on the other hand, when they have been interested in children have been primarily concerned with the socializing functions of the family, educational systems, and other major institutions of society rather than with children’s experiences (James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998). This is certainly true of the ‘oversocialized conception of man’ as Wrong (1961) termed Parsonian structuralfunctionalist sociology. Some scholars, particularly those in the relatively new field of the sociology of childhood (Corsaro, 1997; James et al., 1998; Jenks, 1996), have been critical of the ‘dominant paradigms’ in both psychology and sociology. In our opinion, what is needed is an approach to children’s experience that is systemic, acknowledging the multi-directional synergistic aspects of numerous factors that combine to influence the ways in which children develop. To do this one must move beyond an approach that is narrowly based within a single discipline, but find ways to bridge disciplinary boundaries (Kuczysnki, Harach, & Bernadini, 1999). Fortunately ecological theories, with roots reaching back over the past century (Tudge, Gray, & Hogan, 1997) can help us not only integrate psychological and sociological perspectives, but also provide methods that allow us to focus on children’s experiences. In this chapter we describe and evaluate an ecological approach to naturalistic observations that we believe is a valuable tool for researching children’s experiences. The method rests on two premises: first, that children are embedded within social and cultural contexts and that the relationship